I visited the divided city of Hebron two weeks ago. There I met Badia Dwaik, a Palestinian who works for the group “Youth Against Settlements.” Today, Hebron, the largest Palestinian city on the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) is divided along religious and ethnic lines. Palestinians are permitted only in certain areas. In theory Jews are also restricted to their areas. But the reality is much different.

While Badia was showing us Shuhada Street, the former and now completely shuttered commercial center of Hebron, Phil Weiss had his tape rolling. The video is seven minutes long. At 0:50, a settler boy rides into view from the distance. The words he calls out to an Israeli soldier are, in Hebrew: “hoo aravi, asoor lo lehiyot po.” (In English: He’s Arab, it’s forbidden for him to be here”). Who’s in charge? During the entire seven minutes we were in full view of a checkpoint perhaps 50 meters away (you can see it around the 2:30 mark, after the car almost mowed us down), and the two soldiers manning it didn’t object to Badia’s presence. There was no issue until the boy rode up on the horse.

Must the soldiers always back the settlers, even when the issue at hand is absurd? What are the rules? Nothing more than what any one settler or soldier decides they are? The settlers don’t obey the rules when the rules become inconvenient for them. The “rules” allowed Badia to be there on that street. If Israeli settlers can’t accept the outcomes of rules that overwhelmingly benefit them at the expense of Palestinian rights, then what would a fair-minded person suggest the Palestinians do? Badia stood his ground in a dignified and peaceful manner. His calm and entirely rational responses to the boy and the soldier constituted an act of nonviolent resistance.

Badia was a rational man standing in an irrational situation. The “problem” that agitated the boy was illusory. The irrationality of the odd event Phil and I witnessed that day in Hebron was in fact the backdrop the boy emerged from, the backdrop of an utterly distorted system.

A system can become so distorted that meanness itself takes over; injustice itself takes over. People are human, but if you keep them in a system that is absurd, the framework of life becomes so distorted that they cannot avoid doing harm.

This is true of all people, and all distorted systems. It has nothing to do with being a Jew, a Muslim, a Christian. The person has no channel and no outlet for fairness, for simple human back-and-forth, when the system is unjust and absurd.

An unjust system backed by one-sided force is like a foolish boy on a horse. Something childish driven by something powerful.

UPDATE: Israeli forces went from house to house on Friday in Nabi Saleh, searching through homes and firing stun grenades, injuring one person in his hand and reportedly damaging some property. A total of six demonstrators – Palestinian, Israeli and international – were arrested during the demonstration on Friday. They were all reportedly released on Friday evening.

Israeli forces enter a Palestinian home during search operation in Nabi Saleh Friday

The raid came during the weekly protest in Nabi Saleh, in which some 100 people participated. As demonstrators approached the village’s spring, which has been seized by the neighboring settlement of Halamish, the Israeli forces arrested at least five women, including Nariman Tamimi, a prominent activist from the village. Her arrest is pictured below. Her daughters are seen trying to intervene as Israeli soldiers detained their mother, but they were forcibly held back.

Correction: This report initially termed the Israeli army search raid on the village an arrest operation. Nabi Saleh residents were removed from their homes during the search, but none were ultimately arrested. (This does not include the six arrested during the protest.)

For more on Nabi Saleh: NYTimes reporter among arrestees in West Bank protests

The Christian Fundi's through their leader The Reveran Hagee's organization Christians For Israel, back these Settlers in Migron who are refusing to give up stolen land from Palestinian land owners.

Illegal Migron Settlers Vow To Resist Eviction

By JTA

Published August 26, 2012.

Residents of the West Bank outpost of Migron have said they will not leave their homes until the Supreme Court rules on a request to halt their evacuation due to their purchase of the land.

Residents of the outpost earlier this month asked the court to halt the evacuation as it works to verify the claims by some residents that they had purchased, or repurchased, the land on which their homes are located.

The eviction is scheduled for Tuesday, the same day that the court is scheduled to discuss the case. The residents say they will not leave before the hearing. The Defense Ministry has called on the residents to leave peacefully, beginning in the morning.

About 50 families live in the outpost, which is located some 14 miles north of Jerusalem. Some 17 families are contesting the evacuation, saying they own the land their homes are built on.

Temporary homes have been established in the nearby settlement of Psagot for the Migron families. But the Migron residents will only be able to move into the homes if the leave their outpost voluntarily, according to reports.

In March, the Supreme Court ruled against an attempt by the government to postpone to 2015 the demolition of Migron, which the Palestinians say is built on their land. Deferrals against the demolition stretch back to 2006.

The settlers, who deny that Migron is built on private Palestinian land, had signed a deal with the Netanyahu government agreeing to relocate to a nearby hill.